Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  “Light passes through porcelain in a manner that makes it seem both luminous and internally lit. An artificial tooth formed from porcelain materials, containing finely divided opacifying particles, including refracting pigment particles, can refract and transmit light in a manner exactly resembling the opalescence of a natural tooth.”

  Mamita, smile again, please, I say. Just hold that smile a sec. I pull my phone from my pocket and take a picture of my mother’s smile.

  I was a year out of college when I did go to live in Tío Memo’s house in Guatemala City. Most days I holed up in my cousin’s bedroom—Freddy was studying at Texas Tech—on the side of the garden opposite the main house, trying to write the three short stories required for my MFA school applications, and spent most of my free time hanging out with the primas, my two teenage girl cousins, and their friends. On a whim, I also submitted those stories to the fiction editor of a magazine in New York whose name, whenever my primas tried to pronounce it, came out sounding like Er-squirrel. A few months later I was back in New York, living in a rented loft over a vacuum cleaner shop on Fourteenth Street with three roommates, including Frecky Papperman, and was still half-asleep the morning that he brought the phone with the long cord into my little plywood alcove down at the loft’s noisy street end: A Mr. Rust, said Frecky, is on the line. It turned out that Er-squirrel’s venerable fiction editor was phoning to tell me that he wanted to publish two of the three short stories I’d sent to the magazine. One of those stories was inspired by Space Cavanaugh’s toolshed, the other was partly about Gail and her dogs and the flower shop. Afterward, I lingered in bed trying to absorb that news and finally chose a book from the pile next to my mattress that seemed appropriate to this life-changing moment, a paperback of the Carlos Baker biography of Ernest Hemingway, and opened it at the index, found my name, and turned to the page where I read that on a November morning in 1981, Francisco Goldberg learned that he’d become a published writer too. HaHaHa, our Hemingway here, you don’t have the character, the guts …

  The young editorial assistant in charge of the slush pile told me later that it was the anomaly of receiving a manila envelope covered with Guatemalan airmail stamps that made her curious to read what was inside. Thanks to that stroke of luck, I was earning my living as a writer—I’d sold my stories for a thousand dollars each—and so I decided not to accept the offer of a scholarship to an MFA program and spend the next few years in the middle of cornfields working on In the Toolshed and Other Stories. Instead, I wrote my first “war correspondent” article for Er-squirrel—its new owners said they wanted to bring “new blood” into the magazine’s journalism—about what was going on in Guatemala, as depicted, mostly, through the eyes of my primas and their friends. “My father says that every morning now when he goes for his jog he runs past at least one dead body flung onto the side of the road.” “People are saying it’s going to be a Black November, that the Mayas are going to come down from the mountains into the city with their machetes and slaughter us all!” When Bonzo was elected president, Tío Memo and Tía Meche were ecstatic, they scorned the previous US president as Jimmy Castro. Human rights only meant rights for Communists. In my article I didn’t only describe life inside those upper-middle-class high walls that shut out so much of the annihilation going on beyond them, but I also tried to portray my own guilt and confusion over being trapped behind them too. A striking thing is that Tío Memo never said a negative word about my article, at least not to me, even though so much of it drew on what I’d observed while living in his house.

  One evening during that year in Guatemala City, my aunt and uncle had thrown a cocktail party, which is where I’d met Ursula, who’d come with her parents. She was around my age, maybe a year or two younger, a skinny girl in an unfashionable yellow dress that I guessed her parents had made her wear since she seemed so uncomfortable in it. Her father was a lot older than Tío Memo yet seemed to defer to him. It turned out that Ursula was a medical student at the public university, San Carlos. Holding our weak scotch and sodas, served in glasses neatly swaddled in paper napkins, as is the genteel custom down there so that your fingers won’t get cold, we began our obligatory conversation. Whatever we were making small talk about was swiftly subsumed by the urgency in her pale-brown eyes, magnified by her eyeglass lenses, and her determined voice. Once a week, Ursula told me, she had a forensic medicine class in the Hospital Roosevelt morgue. Some days, when she got there, there were so many bodies they had to be stacked like firewood on the floor. I remember her exact words: And you should see the condition they arrive in.

  I should see. Well, probably, I should, but … In a small staff nook in that hospital a few days later, I pulled on, over my clothes, the doctor’s robe Ursula had handed me. She tucked a pair of examination gloves into its pocket and hung a stethoscope around my neck, an odd instrument for where we were going. We went into the morgue. There weren’t bodies stacked like firewood that day, but there were corpses laid out on three of the concrete autopsy tables. The cement floor had a wet sheen, as if just hosed. Up until that day, the only dead person I’d seen, a peek into the open coffin, was shrunken Grandpa Moe in a suit and tie and white yarmulke. On the autopsy table closest to us lay the corpse of a young man with a trimly muscular body, a handsome face with Amerindian features, eyes serenely closed, skin youthfully toned and damp, a black mustache, soft-looking instead of bristly, and wisps of chin hair. His torso and arms were speckled with brownish dots. Ursula whispered, Those are cigarette burns. What looked like a popped blister, circular and pink, was where his penis should have been. His smooth feet were unblemished and melancholy looking, pointing up as if gazing back at his face. What we were doing was risky, and I suppose other things besides risky, and we quickly left. As soon as we got into her car, one of those little hatchbacks, she asked if I’d noticed that his throat had been slit. I hadn’t. They’d already cleaned him, she said, and washed away the blood.

  Afterward we went to a restaurant in la Zona Viva, owned by a Belgian, where we ordered quiche and salad and tried to have a normal conversation. Over the years, I’ve often described that visit to the morgue as “the day I became a journalist.” As if just asking the inevitable questions—who was he, who did this to him, and why?—sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole that I came out the other end of changed into a journalist. Probably all of Guatemala knew who was doing that, to young men and women especially, and why. Then what difference could it make to see it for yourself? Because to witness something like that implicates you, it allows that reality to go on living inside you, growing darker, more impenetrable, unless you accept the challenge of living with it and trying to make it clearer instead of ever darker and more confusing. Though, of course, you can also try to run from it. But could even the most astute and veteran journalist explain to me how the murdered torture victim in the morgue and having quiche for lunch in the Belgian’s restaurant fit coherently together inside the same hour—or even inside the same life? I remember our lunch, the quiche and salad, as vividly as I do the morgue. We didn’t eat in complete silence, but I don’t remember anything we said, just an impression of Ursula’s eyes like small wet leaves stuck to the inside of her eyeglass lenses. I wondered what came next. It didn’t seem possible that all that was going to happen after lunch was that she was going drive me back to my uncle’s house, but that was all that happened.

  I left that story about the morgue out of that first magazine journalism piece so as not to expose Ursula to any danger. Later I heard that her parents had sent her to live in California.

  Before I leave the nursing home today, I’m going to show my mother that photograph of her maternal grandfather posing with her mother, Abuelita, when she was young. I have the photo in my backpack. I brought it last visit, too, though that time I didn’t take it out in the end. I didn’t want to upset her, even though I do think it’s only right that she see it. Like el joven, my mother’s father was an illegitimate chil
d, but that was never a secret. My mother always told us about her grandfather Colonel Montejo, who’d recognized Abuelito as his son. My mother knows the names of both her grandfathers, but she’s never been able to tell me who her grandmothers were.

  Mami, I’d insist, it’s impossible that your father never spoke to you about his own mother. He never did, she’d respond, like that was normal. The few times I’d asked Tío Memo, he’d answered pretty much the same: Ay Frankie, a saber, who knows. Maybe my abuelo’s mother was a prostitute or a beautiful concubine. Maybe she was a servant, like el joven’s mother.

  Abuelita’s father, Luis Hernández, emigrated from Spain and became a rancher, Mamita always had stories to tell about her maternal grandfather. His true calling as a cattle rancher came to him late in life, after years of failing to strike it rich, that’s how that gachupín-in-the-tropics legend went. In some versions, he started out as a cattle rustler, riding with his outlaw cowboys into El Salvador to steal his first herds. In Guatemala, those herds prospered and multiplied, as did the number of his ranches. He became mayor of his pueblo and married the prettiest niña living there. In the family history that my mother and uncle shared, that girl, their grandmother, was always an adolescent, and Luis Hernández was always around fifty. She gave him six children, four boys and two girls, but she died giving birth to Tía Nano, Abuelita’s little sister whom Mamita always loved like a second mother. What was the name of that prettiest girl in the pueblo, Mamita, who gave birth to the Spanish rancher’s six children, including your own mother and aunt? My mother didn’t know her name or anything else about her.

  You mean you don’t know the names of either of your grandmothers, and that doesn’t bother you. You were never even curious? I’d often pester her. No, it didn’t bother her. She was never even curious.

  After my great-grandfather the Spanish rancher died, his four sons inherited ranches, and his two daughters, Abuelita and Tía Nano, came to the capital with their dowry trunks to live in a boardinghouse, a finishing school–type place run by twin sisters from France. Abuelito managed one of the big general stores on Séptima Avenida in the center, and on weekends he sold imported toys from Germany and France from a pushcart in the city’s Parque Central, in front of the cathedral. On one of those Sundays in the park, he met Abuelita.

  Two nameless great-grandmothers, like two holes in the head. The missing identity of the Spanish rancher patriarch’s wife, my great-grandmother, was the most perplexing family mystery. Until, about a year ago, when a letter from Guatemala arrived for me at my publisher’s in New York by regular post. How easily that envelope could have been mislaid had that young editorial assistant who opened it, recognizing its potential importance to me, not express mailed it to Mexico City. Inside that envelope was a private letter and a photograph. The letter was from a woman named Sandra Hernández, who wrote that we were related through the Hernández family. We must be close in age. She’d been meaning to write to me since reading an interview in a Guatemalan newspaper in which I’d mentioned not knowing anything about either of my two great-grandmothers. “First of all, I can tell you that our great-grandparents hailed from Los Esclavos, Santa Rosa, on the Costa Sur,” Sandra wrote. “Our great-grandfather’s name was Luis Hernández, by profession a farmer and cattle rancher, and our great-grandmother was named Francisca García. Everyone called her Panchita. As the color of her skin demonstrated, she was of African origin. Your great-grandmother Panchita was beloved by all for her lively personality, the strength of her character, and for her kindness. She died in childbirth, to her infant daughter, María, who became known as Nano. That, Francisco, was what was passed down from my abuelo to my father and to us, about our great-grandmother.” That’s the part of the letter I know by heart now, though it was several pages long, telling the whole story of the Hernández rancher clan, generation by generation, down to Sandra and her own children. When Luis Hernández died, his ranches were left to his oldest son; orphaned Abuelita, exiled by her brothers to the city with her baby sister and their meager, landless inheritances, severed relations with the family forever after. Sandra Hernández is now a professor of women’s studies and feminism at the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala City. “About your family on the Montejo side,” she wrote, “all I know is that your grandfather committed suicide.”

  Abuelita’s mother was black, so that was the big family secret. On the Costa Sur, mostly to work the sugar plantations in the lowland heat that so many highland Maya couldn’t endure, the Spaniards had brought in African slaves from the Caribbean plantations. That Abuelita was a mulatta, with her flat nose and wide nostrils, her broad cheeks, even her heavy-lidded eyes, now seemed obvious in her photographs, though that had never occurred to me before. Mamita, with her orange kinky hair, was what used to be called, in a city like New Orleans, a quadroon. What Sandra wrote about Abuelito having committed suicide was also new to me. I assumed he must have been bipolar, maybe schizophrenic, but I’d always understood that it was being struck by a bus in downtown Guatemala City that had killed him. After all, Don Paco was known to be always in a hurry, speeding along the sidewalks with the shiny dome of his bald head lowered while pedestrians parted to make way. It seemed believable that he’d accidentally collided with a bus, I still consider that the likeliest version. But I also understand that if Abuelito did commit suicide, even by intentionally ramming his head into an oncoming bus, it would have been kept secret from my sister and me and our cousins. When I was a boy, my mother had let slip some stories about her father’s “colorful” manic episodes, really bouts of full-throttle madness. On random mornings, inexplicably singing Verdi arias at the top of his lungs, Abuelito would bolt from the house out into the city, inevitably ending up in a brothel and giving away family money and properties to whores. He only sang Verdi arias during his attacks of madness. Abuelita managed to get all their banking accounts and properties put solely under her own name, an unprecedented maneuver for a woman in those days, but the rough cattle rancher’s mulatta daughter with the French finishing school polish, if that wasn’t a fiction, too, always had friends where it counted. Tío Memo used to have to chase his father down and get him into a straitjacket. Then they’d take the slow United Fruit Company train with its open-air wooden carriages that ran through the heart of the banana plantations, a tunnel of emerald green with stops named for Ivy League colleges, to Puerto Barrios, where they’d book a cabin on a banana boat—some of the human passengers were also bananas!—to New Orleans so that Abuelito could receive electric shock therapy. After I included some of those stories in my first novel, my mother reacted as if from now on everywhere she went people were going to say, There’s that poor woman, insanity runs in her family. Nobody should risk marrying her children. Whether anyone ever reacted in the way my mother feared isn’t the point, I’d violated her ingrained discretion and decorum. From then on, she hardly ever passed up a chance to say to her Guatemalan relatives and friends: Don’t tell Frankie anything. He’ll put it in a book.

  The photograph that my distant cousin Sandra Hernández sent with her letter was a copy of an old-fashioned studio portrait of great-grandfather Luis posing with his adolescent daughter, Abuelita. With his wrinkled dark suit, dusty shoes, thick double-buckle belt, splendid white mane, self-assured posture, and hard-ass expression, though I sense an underlying sadness, too, he did look like a ruthless cattle rustler who became a prosperous, no less ruthless rancher and mayor. But no way was he a Spaniard.

  Now I take the photograph out of my backpack, pull it from its envelope, and lay it down atop the Scrabble board for my mother to see. I tell her about the letter from her distant relative, Sandra Hernández, a professor at San Carlos. Your abuela’s name was Francisca, I say, but everyone called her Panchita. Panchita had African ancestry, I say lightly. She was black.

  My mother giggles and clucks her tongue, says, Ay Frankie, that’s not true.

  But your abuelito looks like an inti
midating rascal, I cheerfully press on. Doesn’t he? Ma, really, what an impressive-looking man. You should be proud. I can’t help adding: But he sure wasn’t a Spaniard.

  My mother stares down at the photograph, white scalp showing through her orangey curls. This is too much for her to process now. All those years that my mother stood over the sink straightening her hair and dyeing it from orange to black, was she fully aware of what she was hiding and why? Did my father even know, suspect, or have any opinion about it?

  Though my abuelos aren’t here to explain themselves, it seems obvious they made their own mothers disappear in order to protect their children from knowing the truth about their own forebears and from the social repercussions of others finding out. In the case of great-grandma Panchita, at least, it was racial shame.

  Abuelita looks so lovely, I say. Doesn’t she? Isn’t it wonderful to have this photo of Abuelita when she was so young?

  A slight smile forms on my mother’s lips, and her expression is rheumy-dreamy. My heart clenches. Mamita so loved her mother. I put the photograph away. It’s not as if some major injustice has been righted, not even the injustice committed inside one family. But I’m glad to have this photograph. I’m happy to have found out that my great-grandfather Luis Hernández looked like such a Don Cabrón and that he wasn’t a Spaniard. I’m even happier to have an idea of who my great-grandmother was. I love that she was named Panchita. If I ever have a daughter, I’ll name her Panchita.